Dark Resurrection: Shadows of Nekrom

The colossal shadows receded, taking with them the suppression imposed on Tristessa's senses. She began to see again and she no longer saw wolves, but the glow of artificial light; she could hear again and she no longer heard her own screams or the sound of her arms and legs being torn off, or her bones breaking, or her organs and muscles tearing apart.

What she heard now was a musical composition consisting of a violin and piano interplay, distorted with static and echo, like an old gramophone. It was very familiar melody to her, she had no doubt that she had heard that song before…

But was that music she heard real? Was that light real?

Because she knew that what she saw was not through her real eyes, nor was what she heard through those ears. That body was not the one she remembered: it felt lighter than air and more… ethereal, if she could afford to use that word. Furthermore, that body could not even be defined as tangible; to say that it felt solid from nonexistence brought immediate contradictions, but that was how she felt at that moment. Absent, in an immaterial limbo, conscious…

And broken into pieces. Frightened and infinitely in pain.

"…Ah…It hurts…it hurts…it hurtsithurtsithurts…" she thought, her frantic mind deep in despair, since speaking was impossible because her throat had been torn to pieces. And therefore, her soul reflected that damage, mimicking and replicating the primary reaction to a physical injury that put life at risk. A natural mechanism that, brought to a plane beyond the material, was a catastrophic failure that only served to abhor that existence. "Why didn't I die? Kill me now… Please, kill me! I want to die, right now, NOW!"

She couldn't shake off the indescribable pain of having been devoured alive. The hundreds of wolves' teeth went further by piercing her red flesh, destroying her organs and fragmenting her bones: now her soul lay in ruins, scattered and frying her non-existent brain with the worst of phantom pains.

In parallel with her agony, her senses also became more acute with each notion of time that advanced in that continuum that violated natural laws, allowing the girl to distinguish dozens of fluorescent lights as the sources of that illumination, distributed along a ceiling that let her know, consequently, that she was lying down. The cold metal of the table, or bed, was deep and yet it did not even serve to appease her suffering a little.

"KILL ME!"

She wanted to scream with her true voice, to reverberate everywhere and express the extreme fear that dominated every inert piece of her soul-body, but she could only complain of the pain in silence.

"Please…I…"

Suddenly, new sounds. Footsteps. Footsteps against a metal floor, given the echo that could be heard between the distorted notes of the music.

Tristessa tried to look in all directions but strangely her gaze was slightly fixed on a section of the ceiling, which showed more details as the fluorescent lights became more tolerable to the eye: the material of the ceiling was skin and strands of muscle, dripping black water as it twisted like a sponge, without ceasing thanks to the movement generated by hundreds of small pistons of polished black metal, which pierced the organic material and moved in periodic synchrony, like the movement of a wave that went from one end to the other.

"W-what…? For god's sake…"

In life, Tristessa would have screamed, kicked and cried at such a scene worthy of the most horrible of nightmares. But there, trapped in that limbo where death had been denied to her, she could only see, suffer and nothing more, like a victim of sleep paralysis.

She saw all those hundreds of thousands of dark water drops fall off the bloody ceiling in constant movement and evaporate almost instantly, leaving behind a trail; a dark, gaseous effluent that was distributed chaotically along the ceiling and that room, indestructible in the presence of artificial light.

It was miasma. The origin of the Discord between life and death; the evil air that abounded in that place.

The footsteps multiplied, and between the tongues of miasma, Tristessa saw eight silhouettes appear on her periphery, four on each side. Eight humanoid entities of undefined sex that surrounded her, wearing white robes almost entirely stained with rust; Their faces covered by black veils, preventing even a hint of what was hidden behind, attached to their hairless heads with barbed wire, driven deep into them and constantly expelling lines of fresh blood.

Simultaneously, the silent figures raised their arms, showing Tristessa that none of them had hands, but rather surgical instruments such as scissors, saws, scalpels and tweezers, all attached to bone and muscle crudely, with heat bonding the skin to the metal, and copper wires brutally inserted and bent to ensure rigidity.

"No… No! PLEASE, NO!"

The Surgeons of Death began to manipulate, violate and experiment with what remained of Tristessa's soul, ignoring her silent screams.

She was living a true, personal hell. The miasma covered everything, filling the surroundings of her own operating table with an intolerant and naturally malevolent smell. Even so, she saw the silhouettes of the surgeons cutting, sawing, opening, closing and holding; she felt the cold contact of metal between her ethereal limbs, in her entrails and on her back, as they manipulated her ribs and spine.

"What did I do to deserve this?! Tell me, damn it!"

She would have given everything to truly scream for even a few seconds. To release part of the deep agony that was devastating her nonstop, and to pray to the gods of all the worlds to free her from this torment.

But the surgeons cut, repaired and unified, replicating again and again the suffering of being torn into a thousand pieces but in reverse: her soul condemned to oblivion was simply not ready to return to its original form. No living being was. The damage done was that, done, and it had to stay that way; entropy was infallible in all planes of existence.

"W-why?" the girl lamented, staring at the surgeon who was manipulating the inside of her abdomen with a saw. "Tell me why you won't let me die!"

In silence, the Surgeons of Death continued, joining the broken pieces of her soul and going against the natural order of things. They were agents of someone or something with enough authority to supersede the rules that governed universal concepts such as life and death.

Those grim implements that replaced their hands and metal cords bathed in blood went to work on Tristessa's neck and face, while time cruelly flowed at its universally slow whim.

"…"

Until, after an eternity, the girl's torment receded.

"…Ah…"

A sigh, abstract in essence, escaped from her recomposed throat.

The surgeons had finished their dirty work, and they stood there like statues, motionless and surrounded by miasma, bordering the work table on which the girl slowly began to straighten. Her body was intact, as good as new, even protected by the same clothes she had come to the new world in.

"…Uh…?"

Surrounded by that thick miasma, Tristessa extended her arms and looked at her hands, the lines of skin constantly caressed by the shadows.

…Ahh…ahh…UGH...!" Her throat, now intact, could articulate sounds. Trembling, Tristessa could not look away, between layers of tears that accumulated in her eyes. There was no pain anymore. "NO, NO, NO, NO, NONONONONO!"

Yet the experience of her death was still there, etched in her spirit. Even as she stared at them, she could feel the absence of her hands, her arms. Further down, she could remember the unholy sensation of her breasts being torn apart, her ribcage split open, and all her organs being ripped out.

"WHY?!"

Her scream overcame the music, creating even more discord between the melodies. Tristessa locked herself in a hug that gave her little comfort, trying to resist the convulsions as her soul replayed over and over the pain of being devoured alive. She vomited bile against her operating table, the only thing inside her repaired stomach; she couldn't stop the spams, and she cried to her heart's content, finally being able to express the feeling of hopelessness and terror her soul retained from her death.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU LET ME DIE?! THIS IS NOT LIFE!" she spat out, her mouth and esophagus burning, and her eyes so saturated with tears that she could see nothing but the dance of the supernatural darkness in front of her face. "WHY?! TELL ME WHY!"

Just as her soul was reaching the edge of absolute collapse, like a house of cards facing hurricane winds, something touched the top of Tristessa's head, which suddenly froze her panic and tormented soul alike.

"Why…why?" she asked, feeling that contact calming her. She sensed that it was a hand; a firm grip and fingers that threatened to pierce her scalp. Strangely, that grip imposed her will, forcing her to accept this post-death reality. "What did I do wrong?"

There was no answer. Tempted to satisfy her curiosity, the girl forced herself to lift her head and stop staring at the surface of the operating table, metallic, corroded and stained with her own vomit. She felt her head being freed, and the first thing she saw when she raised her gaze was a dark hand.

"Ah…!"

And then, her eyes met the owner of that hand, so black from how rotten it was, standing next to the table: a female humanoid creature, with whitish skin as pale as if it had never seen the light of the Sun, except for its totally black and decaying limbs; she wore a black leather trench coat, open to expose her bare chest, without breasts and almost completely mechanized, composed of hundreds of gears of different sizes and turning at different revolutions. Without sexual organs in sight, and her bare, white legs, also possessed hybrid characteristics between an organic and mechanical being, with those gears and metal components that stood out between the skin. A veil, also semi-transparent, protected half of her face, devoid of skin and exposing muscle and both lines of teeth, black and rotten, while on the top of her head shone the absence of a nose and the presence of two eyes as dark as the abyss, which perpetually shed thin lines of tears of blood.

"Who… are you?" Tristessa asked, equally frightened and amazed, her interest drawn not only by the fact that it was an entity she could never have even imagined that existed, but by its long, dark, straight hair that was not subject to the influence of gravity and floated chaotically. "What are you?"

Again, there was no answer. Tristessa, without moving from her place at the table, looked more closely at the arms and legs of that mechanical she-devil, realizing that the dark color was due to the clockwork pieces protruding from the skin absorbing the miasma from the environment and recirculating it throughout her body.

"…"

Silently and without saying anything, the creature extended its hand towards the girl, who in her absolute surprise, took it without a second thought. A very cold contact that Tristessa ignored due to the sudden excitement that was forming inside her.

She stood up from the operating table, with some difficulty due to her trembling legs, which were subject to shivers generated by the conflict unleashed in her mind about having intact legs again, and not eaten away to the bone by giant wolves. She held on tightly to the hand of her creepy companion so as not to fall.

"I-I… could you…?" Tristessa didn't know what to say, so she let her mouth work on its own. "Can I hug you?"

"…"

The blush on her face was more than the stupefaction at what she said, although the creature didn't care. She ignored Tristessa and turned around, pulling her hand to guide her through the room.

"Is she a succubus…?" Tristessa thought, information about religious mythology vibrating in her mind, and still embarrassed by her sudden and unexplained attraction to that creature. She saw its complex machinery that made up her torso, fueled by the evil miasma of the environment. Her own stomach twisted, albeit in a pleasurable way, and making her embarrassment grow even more. "To think that she has such an effect on me…"

She was so enthralled by that horrible, inhuman entity that she realized too late to look around: dozens, no, maybe hundreds of surgeons lived in that room; just like those eight who had been in charge of repairing her soul, they all looked like mannequins, frozen in time and waiting for orders, and they were only differentiated by the objects that occupied the place of their hands. The ceiling was still in constant motion with those pistons, a disgusting spectacle, not far from the grotesque tiled walls, rotten and covered with black stains, as if from humidity, but which strangely moved in coordination with the miasma. Only a few ancient sirens scattered on the walls were saved from the rot, and they were the ones through which the music was played.

"Uh… That music… My head," she complained, feeling the sting in her temple that was absolutely nothing compared to the infinite pain from which she had just escaped. "My… memory."

She didn't know where she was or why she was there. Was this Hell? Or Paradise? Or an eternal limbo? The only irrefutable fact was that she had died in a horrible way; she had lost her body and her soul was saved from oblivion thanks to... that Darkness. Discord made real, manifested in those black drops and unnatural mist.

"Why am I still here?" she asked, weakly and trying to touch the miasma with her free hand. Like the mist, that shadowy and constantly expanding presence dispersed at the contact, losing density but not presence. "How cold... and... and terrifying."

Terror. Thinking about that word made her remember that at the very moment of her death, a memory had been unlocked in her mind: that vestibule, the door, the entrance to the Dark Room, and...

"My mom... Selene!"

That word caused a cascading effect throughout that alternate dimension: the surgeons shuddered, causing the hundreds of utensils to replicate different noises; the music became even more out of sync, and the miasma intensified violently, becoming a heavy atmosphere that Tristessa felt on her shoulders like weights.

"…"

The succubus stopped dead and turned her head slightly, staring at Tristessa out of the corner of her eye, then putting her index finger to her lips and asking her to be quiet.

"What happened?" she asked herself after nodding wildly, without saying a word. They resumed their walk, through the alley made by the surgeons who stepped aside in the presence of the she-devil. "Why did naming my mom have such an effect? ​​Damn it… I don't remember…"

Even in that post-death, she was barred from her memories. If when she died she only remembered her mother's name and that terrifying, strange vestibule with the entrance to a dark room... What did she have to do to remember everything else? Die thousands more times? Unfortunately, there was only one life and she had lost it very quickly...

But, if she was dead, why was she still there, conscious and pensive? Although that reality did not fit in terms of physics or natural laws to the world -or worlds, better said- that she had experienced firsthand, each fragment of time that passed made her believe less in a possibility of hell or paradise.

The reasoning made Tristessa consider the option that she was dreaming. That option sounded nice: a big, horrible, long and fateful dream.

"Wake up, go back to my room with my dolls, my comb. My... my... uh, shit! Why can't I remember anything other than my mom's name?"

Thinking about her mother was counterproductive. Her memories tried to reorganize themselves in vain, searching for what she couldn't find without stopping, repeating the same process over and over again, hoping for a different answer than the only one that subsisted inside her head.

Cement walls and a steel door. A face hidden in the darkness of her mind, but with a clear, mocking and haughty voice, repeating that question over and over again:

"Still here, Tristessa?"

For some unknown reason, the girl felt a significant flow of anger running through her veins, heating her blood and squeezing the succubus's hand tightly, who didn't notice at all and continued to guide the confused Tristessa towards the entrance of that operating room. Without doors, it was only a door-frame that had an old clock with hands placed on the upper wall, its glass broken and stopped at a time that Tristessa found terrifyingly familiar.

"7…25…and…45."

Once again, she found no trace in her broken memories of the significance of those numbers. But it was her intuition, her survival instinct that was slowly regaining its place within her, those who warned her about what she had forgotten.

It was another mystery to leave for another time, if she had more time available in that limbo of the afterlife. Outside the operating room, she and her inhuman companion began to walk down a long, gloomy hallway, with extremely dirty porcelain walls that dripped dark liquid from some interstices. There were fluorescent lights every few meters offering some illumination from the ceiling, also in decay with leaks through the fissures of small cracks. And, of course, any trace of liquid that found space to escape inevitably ended up converted into miasma.

"…wait a minute," Tristessa muttered after several minutes of silent walking, her brow furrowed and unable to do anything to stop the progressive movement of the demoness. "We're going in circles, aren't we?"

The hallway was extremely long, uniform, and so similar in every way beyond the random arrangement of cracks through which the precursor of the miasma seeped. She had no real evidence to support that theory, but Tristessa felt it: it was a progression that stretched into infinity, with no beginning or end. A snake eating its own tail.

"Hey, answer me, please!" Even applying all the strength her newly recovered body could summon, she couldn't stop the succubus even a millimeter. Maybe if she exerted violence… No, just thinking about it made her heart threaten to stop, as if an invisible hand had closed around it and toyed with the option of crushing it or not. It wasn't a terror of dying, but a fear—irrational in that context—of losing a loved one. "At least tell me what you'll do with me…!"

At that moment, a new sound made Tristessa fall silent. It echoed in the distance, but progressing down the hall made it louder and louder with each step.

A metallic sound of rapid and successive blows, which after that burst it stopped for a moment and started again. Soon the echo was so loud that it was easy to guess that the origin of the noise was a few meters away, and the tension that Tristessa accumulated in her shoulders was reaching the point of pain.

"Another…demon?"

Out of the shadows, what the girl saw next was a new humanoid entity but that retained little or no trace of humanity in its person, beyond its feminine appearance. Its legs were covered by a skirt of a dark material that moved perpetually, as if it were made of water from the depths of the abyss. Her torso, like that of Tristessa's escort, was also almost completely reconstructed with abundant clockwork machinery, although it was partially covered by a layer made of thin, bloody red muscle fabric that emerged from behind her right shoulder, passed over it and down to her waist. There was also another similar fleshy layer but it emerged from behind the other shoulder and was in free fall.

Two shattered wings, boneless and reduced to nothing more than rotting skin and muscle.

CLING…CLING…CLING…

More gears and miasma suction points protruded from that other demoness' arms, and with hands that looked like claws due to the sharp and long nails she had, she pulled a thick chain inside the wall, generating that loud metallic noise.

What moved that chain was a complex and intricate network of bars that blocked the passage through the following section of the hallway. Made of obsidian and carved with hundreds of thousands of runes, the bars prevented the access of even the tiniest insect.

Nothing that carried a soul was allowed to pass... Or at least, that's what the guardian of that place dictated; that mechanical angel with broken wings.

"Mmm... Ah..."

Two erotic sounds came from inside the succubus's mouth, filling Tristessa with that confusing feeling of heat inside her that even overwrote the fear of the unknown. In response, the new entity stopped the movement of her arms and turned her head, giving her attention to both of them: it was adorned with a black metal crown with points that bent and formed a vertical circle, and it reached up to cover her eyes with a black iron plate with strange red-hot symbols engraved on it. Two slits took the place of her nose, and her mouth was the most human thing she had, reduced to two dark blue lips paralyzed in a disturbing smile that showed teeth stained with blood.

"Huh? W-wait!" The succubus released Tristessa, who despaired at the absence of that cold hand and fingers that had intertwined with hers. With the charm broken, she noticed the unconscious tears and a superfluously broken heart as a result of that separation, incomprehensible to the poor and confused human. "F-fuck… Enough of manipulating my emotions…!"

As Tristessa recovered from the artificial sadness caused by her broken heart, the succubus closed the gap with the other entity and leaned against her chest, still sighing with pleasure. The gears of both creatures engaged and synchronized, made for each other, and the angel enclosed her lover in an embrace, covering her with her putrid wing that she used as a cape.

Both of them took the chains from the wall with their free hands and began to pull, causing the bars to move in different directions this time and, slowly, to begin to show openings towards the darkness. Tristessa saw that there were no lights in the continuation of the hallway, and when the bars finally ended up retreating into the walls, she had a black void front of her. Pure darkness; miasma that had been locked away on the other side for a long time.

Tristessa swallowed non-existent saliva at that heavy feeling of uneasiness on her shoulders. She looked at the inhuman couple in search of silent support, but both of them limited themselves to looking at her with those macabre smiles. They were not willing to guide her; having opened the gate had been more than enough.

She let out a sigh of defeat, and slowly turned her gaze towards the darkness.

"What do they expect me to find in there?" she asked herself, then took a brave step towards the unknown. "Will this be the end of my nightmare, or the beginning?" Or am I really dead and doom awaits me? Perhaps the runes on the bars prayed that I lose all hope upon entering…"

Any thinking being would have thought the same thing. Entering the unknown, the absolute darkness, was intrinsically linked to a primordial fear. A defense mechanism that screamed don't go there, watching over the survival of its host.

But Tristessa, feeling that malignant miasma embracing her body with more fervor, devouring every particle of light that came from the endless corridor, the last thing she felt was fear: each step she took filled her with anxiety, with expectation, with a hope of finding the light at the end of the tunnel that was not compatible with that circumstance.

Discord, the metaphysical manifestation of darkness, became heavier and heavier, to the point that navigating it required a significant effort on the part of the girl. Like fighting against a river current that reached up to her neck, she pushed her body forward, gritting her teeth and with both hands outstretched, pressing against nothing. Without saying a word, her concentration totally dedicated to moving forward, as if the continuity of her spirit depended on it.

She pushed, she pressed, she forced forward. More force, more violence, more momentum to keep going. With her nails digging into what had become a layer of solid darkness, Tristessa scratched and pressed. Breathing became harder, more demanding, but she couldn't give up. Not after having advanced so much. She felt like she was close to achieving a result, she knew it. She knew she had to keep going. More, much more, more force, until her muscles burn from the effort, until her bones ache from the pressure, until her nails break from cutting and her knuckles crack from hitting.

"AHHHHH!"

A scream of fury, a scream of seeking release, echoed through the dark dimension. With her mind dominated by her survival instinct, Tristessa cut off her yell to bite into the miasma and tear, not swallowing, only intending to cause damage and break through.

Nails and teeth, working together, until they tore through that layer of darkness and got out at once. One more war cry, one more.

"AHHHH!" With that scream, with all the strength she could summon in her hands, Tristessa managed to tear open the darkness and instantly her vision turned red. Her ears filled with the sounds of slimy things spilling everywhere. A deep, salty, ferrous smell filled her nose, as she coughed and spat out liquid she had swallowed when her scream ceased. "Ah…uff…"

Cold air filled her lungs, although her body was considerably warm due to the liquid she was soaked in from head to toe. Her limbs were numb, so tired from so much effort that she was forced to crawl on that surface covered in wet, slippery things.

"Uh…fuck…" she whined, her voice sounding rough and weak. She coughed a little more and her dejected body only allowed her to kneel at the cost of feeling the equivalent of thousands of red-hot needles pricking every muscle fiber. "Am I doomed to feel pain forever?"

As she thought, Tristessa wiped her eyes with the back of her hands as best she could, as they were just as dirty as her face. As her vision cleared a little better, she realized that the light of the Twin Moons fell upon her, so beautifully and brightly that she could see clearly in the darkness.

"T-the Forest…!" she wanted to scream but her throat wasn't ready for that. The giant trees rose around her and the leaves fell in the darkness, being gently pushed by the night breeze. "I-I…am…!"

The word alive never came out of her lips, as she realized something terrible when she looked down: she was naked, and almost all of her body was covered in blood. And it wasn't her own blood, nor was it the guts that were spilling across the stone surface and that she was crushing with her knees.

Turning her body slightly and looking over her shoulder, Tristessa saw a giant dead wolf with its belly split open irregularly. Muscles torn, organs expelled to the outside and blood that kept flowing.

Panic took hold of the girl, who, breathing rapidly, with bulging eyes and clenching her teeth to resist crying, looked at her hands, trembling and with pieces of flesh lodged under her nails.

A third scream broke the stillness of the night. A scream of despair.